Of Racial Equity, White Privilege, and Bringing My Kid’s Lunch to School When I Forget to Put It in His Backpack

Ask anyone who knew me 20 years ago, and I’ll bet they’d tell you I was the last person they expected to be a PTO mom.

Back in my 20’s, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a mom at all, much less one who brings matzoh with Nutella to her daughter’s kindergarten class during Passover and drives a hundred miles to chaperone a field trip to the Greenville Zoo. Definitely not the mom who not only makes her kids’ lunches every night but, that time she forgot to put one in her child’s backpack in the morning, took time out of her work day to run it to him at school.

None of this seems remarkable to me now, aside from the fact that I have a flexible enough schedule to be able to do it. Maybe it’s the flexible schedule that makes it all so unremarkable. We all do the best we can for our kids, and this is the best that is open to me.

But that lunch I brought to Jake at school is tsk-tsking me now, shaking a permanently grimy, camouflage-covered, soft, insulating, and BPA-and-phthalate-free lunchbox finger at me.

There are many things I think about every day, and they often include the racial inequities you can’t help but see if your child attends public school. Or if you, say, follow the news or open your eyes and look around.

Since the biggest reason I send my kids to public school is to build their awareness of and compassion about the effects of these inequities—in short, to be friends with children who aren’t white—I think about their white privilege a lot. The things they have that not everyone has. The big boost up that they carry with them through their school day.

But I never gave much thought to that lunch.

Until it came up in a racial equity training session attended by all of the faculty and staff at my kids’ school.

I think I need to repeat that. Every single adult working at my kids’ school is spending the year attending and participating in monthly racial equity training sessions. This is another reason I send my kids to this particular public school.

I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to participate and provide a parent’s perspective. (Parents more adversely affected by racial inequities have been providing their perspective at a number of meetings the school’s Racial Equity Team has held specifically for that purpose.)

And so, a few weeks ago, at a racial equity training session, I was looking at some of the inequities around food and nutrition that one of the working groups had identified. There were plenty I had already thought about. The fact that a larger proportion of the kids of color eat school lunches—available for free or at a reduced cost for those who qualify—than white kids. That this means the predominantly white kids who bring their lunch get first choice of seating, since everyone else has to stand in line for a school meal. That I get to supervise the quality of my kids’ nutrition, to indulge my embrace of organic, local, humane, whole grains, low-sugar. You know, the things that mark me as an economically comfortable, overly educated, white liberal.

And then I saw it. Some parents can bring lunch to school.

I later found out this actually meant that from time to time a parent will pick up some Chik-fil-a and bring it to lunch as a treat for their child. This is totally not something I would do, but my beef (so to speak) with Chik-fil-a is a subject of white liberal outrage for another time and post.

What I thought, with no small amount of shame, was, “I would rather take time out of my work day to bring Jake the lunch I forgot to put in his backpack than have him eat a cafeteria meal.”

Here is where I had to, in the words of the racial equity consultants conducting the training, “embrace paradox.”

The fact that I can bring Jake his lunch when I forget to put it in his backpack marks me as privileged. The fact that I can pack him a lunch at all—that I have the time and access to healthy food—does as well. And so, most shaming of all, does the truth that I would go to this trouble rather than have him eat cafeteria food.

Yes, it’s shaming. But it’s also my child. And herein lies the paradox.

Like I said, we all do the best we can for our children. Some of us are lucky that our best includes access to things only privilege provides access to. But does that mean I shouldn’t give them to my children if I can?

The parent in me—the one who loves my kids fiercely and protectively—says, well, at least sometimes.

It’s worth stopping to think about whether what I’m giving them will make them expect privilege, draw a curtain of misunderstanding between them and kids who don’t have as much. I like to believe I do stop and think and recognize, vocally and often, explaining to Jake and Lily exactly why they don’t get everything they ask for and why they shouldn’t say “Boo, McDonalds!” in front of other kids who might just eat there.

The whole point of working toward racial equity, learning how to speak about it, is that a lot of kids don’t have everything they deserve, not even the bare minimum that they need to be successful. So the answer, quite apparently, isn’t to stop giving my kids what other kids don’t have.

In fact, much as it’s made me think, I’ll still run to school with Jake’s lunch if I forget to send it again. Food is just one of my things. I’ll walk through those halls wearing my yellow visitor’s badge and clutching his lunchbox shrouded in a heavy cloak of white privilege. But I’ll do it for him.

The point isn’t to clean up my act and get perfect. I care deeply about racial inequities. They make me as angry as anything can, and I am committed to helping improve the situation. I could do better. We can all, always, do better.

But I’m thinking more. I’m more aware. After decades of being aware—talking about race and AP classes in high school, engaging in talks about race and racism in college, studying and practicing civil rights law, crying after my weekly law school seminar on race and gender because I was always being called out on unexamined racism—my awareness is still growing.

It’s rare in our grown-up world to be able to recognize how much we still have to learn, how much we are constantly learning. Easy to see in our kids, who are still in school, sucking the information down. Easier to focus on, for me, through yoga, which teaches me to be aware of the rest of my life as well.

It hit me the other day that one of my new yoga teachers is teaching me entirely new ways to approach the same poses I’ve been practicing for years. How amazing, I thought, that after nearly 15 years of practicing, I’m still learning.

This is sort of the point. Buddhism makes it explicit—you must continue to learn and practice and learn some more and then keep practicing so you can learn even more. There are Four Noble Truths to master, and an Eight-Fold Path toward enlightenment. And all this is just upaya—a skillful means or expedient method—not enlightenment itself.

I’m not immune to the fact that practicing yoga is, in this country, a profoundly white privileged thing to do. But it’s my  path to greater understanding, compassion, and awareness of, among other things, racial inequities.

So all of this awareness of my white privilege, and my kids’, this grappling with the inequities that simultaneously benefit and rob them, this is valuable in and of itself. Understanding how the simple act of bringing my son’s lunch to school is loaded with privilege—that’s a big step forward.

It is, to my thinking, a good way to be a parent, and a person. Caring. And teaching my kids to care too. At least I know I can do this much.